Heaven’s gate

Larry Schwartz  
MUSSOLINI had promised a gold medal as an incentive for large families. To qualify, Loreto and Gentilina Iacuone, from the central Italian Abruzzo region, posed for a photograph with some of their children. They were rewarded with a woollen blanket instead.

Now a family heirloom some 15,000 kilometres or so away in Bulleen, Melbourne, that blanket is a reminder of the dispersal from the Iacuones’ otherwise idyllic hilltop town, Tocco, in the harsh post-war years when work was scarce.

Relatives went to New York, Venezuela, Brazil, Canada and Argentina, and several came here. Within 20 years, the family had joined millions voyaging to a new life that in Australia most often began the moment they stepped ashore at Port Melbourne’s Station Pier.

“New York has its Ellis Island,” local chronicler Nicholas Cree has written. “England its Tilbury. Hong Kong its Fragrant Harbor and Canada its Vancouver Bay. When a historian thinks of the symbolic – and actual – entry point for millions of people into Australia, he cannot go past Melbourne’s Station Pier.”
Migrant ships berthed at other piers, notably Princes Pier. But Station Pier, the main passenger liner terminal, was for most the gateway to a new world.

Now in her mid-eighties, Gentilina would remain behind for several years until most of their three daughters and five sons were reunited with Loreto. In 1949, he had been the first of the Iacuones to take the train to Naples and sail on to Australia.

With a factory job and grimy quarters in Collingwood, he sent back money and chocolate then so scarce that one of his sons jokes that in Italy you had to go to Heaven for a taste of it. “Here you could buy it for two and six.”
So enthusiastic was Loreto Iacuone about the opportunity he saw that he sent back word this was “terra santa”, sacred ground, or, as those who would follow loosely translate it, the Holy Land.

The Iacuones came out gradually, paying their way. The last of the eight children arrived in 1967 when air travel was about to become more common than the lengthy sea voyages.

The third eldest, Santina Pezzi, came with her husband, Santino, and their three children in 1967, a decade before the last migrant ship, Australis, called at Port Melbourne’s Station Pier in 1977.

Soon to be redeveloped, Station Pier is a monument to the massive migration that occurred in the decades following a 1946 agreement between the Australian and British governments providing free passage for ex-servicemen and -servicewomen. A million Britons would come out under the scheme, paying a nominal fee (10 for adults, 5 for children).

So busy were its four berths that it greeted more than 177 ships in 1967 alone. That was the year the Pezzis arrived, with one of their daughters, 12 year-old Anna, convinced that everyone in Australia spoke Italian, too.

For most immigrants approaching Melbourne from the water, the conflicting emotions of hope and anxiety would have come to the fore.

“THE first sight?” says Loreto and Gentilina’s son Nazzareno who arrived with a younger brother in 1950. “Well, you couldn’t see any buildings, only trees. From out on the ocean … as you come in, you can’t see anything of interest. To say, `Ah, it’s a beautiful port’ … It wasn’t a beautiful port. It was a bit of timber. You know, it was nothing to look at.”
By 1952, more than 170,000 displaced Europeans had come out here under a pact between the Commonwealth and the International Refugee Organisation. Agreements had been signed to assist migrants from Italy, the Netherlands, Germany, Austria, Greece, Denmark. There were also schemes involving migrants from Belgium, Finland, France, Ireland, Malta, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland and the United States.

They came in shiploads to this distant, in most cases unknown, land.

They came pushed by necessity, often with little inkling of what lay ahead, clutching at what they took for signs that they would be happier. “All I know, because I came six years after my father, he was sending us back money,” says Mrs Lucia Andreotti, one of Nazzareno Iacuone’s three sisters. “He was sending us chocolates. My sister sent material for a dress …”
While some enjoyed relative comfort in their four weeks at sea, it was a long ordeal for others – eating food they weren’t used to, enduring bouts of sea-sickness, overcrowding, couples forced to sleep in separate quarters and, on one occasion, a mid-ocean rescue as a liner went down.

Off the ships and down the gangways they came, wearing colored plastic buttons to indicate destination. Pink for South Australia; blue for private accommodation; purple for Tasmania; green for New South Wales and further north. Wearing white buttons, single female workers were usually sent somewhere other than the main party, often to a Broadmeadows hostel.

By 1955 a million immigrants had arrived, nearly half of them (47 per cent) British. Eleven per cent were from Italy, followed by Poland (seven per cent), the Netherlands (seven per cent), Germany (four per cent), Greece (three per cent), Yugoslavia (2.5 per cent), Russia and Ukraine (two per cent), Latvia (two per cent), and Hungary, Czechoslovakia, the United States and Lithuania (one per cent each).

It is all too easy to romanticise the influx that helped boost the Australian population from 7.3 million in 1944 to 13.3 million in 1973.

IN AN introduction to their book in the late 1970s, `The Immigrants’, Wendy Lowenstein and Morag Loh write that immigration had been “an article of faith – a constant theme” for governments since “the first immigrants, the convicts, came unwilling
despite their `free passage”‘.

After World War II, more non-Britons than Britons arrived – the first time in the history of European settlement here that this had been the case. Nazzareno Iacuone recalls the wariness of the Australian-born in the 1950s: “You didn’t look at them too hard because they would punch you out.” His Italian-born niece Anna Pezzi cringed in the schoolyard of the 1960s when she opened her lunch to discover that Mum had packed bulky mortadella sandwiches.

The rich cultural mix has nourished a nation in way that has less to do with the merits of pizza, souvlaki or a host of other national dishes than with a gusto for a more pervasive liberation from homogeneity.

The migrants often had a tough time of it. Not just those who remained for weeks to months at the Bonegilla reception centre, near Albury, but even those with relatives, such as Nazzareno Iacuone, whose father took him by taxi to a house where they slept four to a room. He still remembers the sight of a dead rat in an unused stove thick with fat, and prepared meals costing more than his weekly wage at the factory.

The Henderson study in 1966 showed that 16.2 per cent of Greeks, 15.3 per cent of Italians and 9.2 per cent of British immigrants, compared with 7.7 per cent of the total population – lived below the poverty line.

Completed in 1930 to replace the original Railway Pier, which was built in 1854 and demolished in 1927, Station Pier has a special significance for countless migrants.

It was here they crossed the aluminium gangways, passed cranes, made their way through Customs examinations areas and into the arms of relatives for joyful reunions in English county dialect, Italian, German, Dutch and other tongues.

FOR some, the mere sight of the pier conjures up a shared experience of arriving in the Antipodes with little more than hope and determination.

Fired by his father’s reports, Nazzareno Iacuone, who turned 17 on the 31-day boat trip, remembers his and his 14-year-old brother’s first impressions as the Greek boat Cyrenia entered port at 11 am on 7 November 1950.

“I looked at Joe and Joe looked at me and we started crying.” So dismal the sight, so vast and little built-up, he wanted to go back home.

A sister, Mrs Natalina Varrasso, had not seen her husband in 20 months when she arrived at Station Pier in 1952. He had left for Australia soon after the wedding. There he was in the crowd, her beloved Sabatino, throwing chocolates up at her as the ship berthed that day.

In her first years here, he would buy her ice-cream almost every day.

The ship bearing another sister, Mrs Lucia Andreotti, arrived one Saturday in 1954. She looked in vain for her father in the crowd on Station Pier. He was late. When he finally turned up, she noticed how he had greyed in the six years since she had last seen him.

She would regularly accompany friends to watch the ships come in.

“Arriving is not the end of it because we kept going back for years.

Every time a ship arrived, we were there.”
The migrants came in their hundreds. On the Achille Lauro, the Arcadia, Bulimba, Euralis, Devonshire, Fairstar, Galileo Galilei, Hellenus, Northern Star, Oriana, Orontes, Roma, Shropshire, Strathnaver. The ships came from the ports of Southampton, Bremerhaven, Genoa. Some stopped off on the way, picking up passengers until every berth was full.

The ships would make their way up the bay, following a series of beacons along the eastern shore. They’d sail due north when the shipping channel forked into two lanes at Fawkner Beacon, nine nautical miles from Station Pier.

Then an immigration official, now in his early sixties, Keith Stodden would regularly board a Customs launch that met the ships in the bay between 1954 and 1962.

Conversing in German, Italian or French (or using someone on hand as interpreter), he would liaise with captains, pursers and other officials, arranging times to go through immigration and explaining what passengers should carry with them.

British and Dutch ships rarely brought people of other nationalities.

But on others, he recalls, there might have been hundreds of Germans embarking at a northern European port, several hundred Austrians, Yugoslav refugees out from the camps in Austria, or Italians boarding at Genoa, as well as passengers picked up en route in Malta, Greece, Cyprus or Egypt.

It generally took a while to clear Customs with bags and property, or to make arrangements to recover baggage that might not have been unloaded or cleared. The first out among those bound for Bonegilla might have a lengthy wait until all the paperwork had been done and everyone in question, including the Red Cross and immigration officials who accompanied passengers, was on board. The end of the sea trip could take a day.

Some, such as the Iacuones, left with relatives there to meet them, in taxis or borrowed cars. Nazzareno remembers the surprise at seeing so many cars compared with Tocco in the city!
Mrs Lucia Andreotti: “There were proxy marriages. Very often you would see someone with a bunch of flowers waiting for someone. The bride was coming.”
Sometimes they were looking for the face of someone else on a photograph they had been sent.

Nazzareno remembers: “They used to call to one another. `You, Angelo?’ No”.

Mrs Andreotti: “Someone in my ship was crying because she had seen the man she had married. Wahhh …” (She laughs.)
Mrs Natalina Varrasso, who recalls that her shoes were ruined during a stopover for quarantine at Point Nepean, remembers that a fellow passenger was upset at the prospect of meeting her husband. “She used to say to me: `You are lucky because you know your husband’. And I said: `Don’t go with him’. I never saw her again. She went to Sydney.”
Nazzareno Iacuone would return to fish off the end of the pier. Some come to watch the TT Line Bass Strait ferry, based at the pier since 1985. Martha Zamanis watched through binoculars the recent launch of its successor, the Spirit of Tasmania.

Each year hundreds come to receive the priest’s blessing and cheer on boys diving for the Cross at Theophania, the Greek Christmas ceremonial blessing of the waters.

With long-awaited redevelopment of the pier scheduled to begin before Christmas, the Victorian chief executive for the Sydney-based Mirvac Group, Mr Kevin Hunt, says the group is considering proposals for an immigration museum on the site but has not
committed itself at this stage.

Martha Zamanis, for one, fears that, unless a migration museum is built here, commercial development by Mirvac could mean that people lose sight of this aspect of the pier’s past.

KEITH STODDEN says his “dream” is to have one of the old migrant liners moored off Station or Princes Pier “as a permanent memorial to the millions of people who passed through the port of Melbourne as migrants”.

Among their first impressions, some such as Martha Zamanis tell of the smell of biscuits from the nearby Swallows factory. Others, such as Nazzareno Iacuone, recall the smell of pies and pasties from the kiosks that will be incorporated in the redeveloped pier.

Visiting sailors nicknamed the western kiosk “Smoky Joe’s”. Up to 16 people work in the shop, run by Ted Rohan who has vivid memories of the times the migrants came through here.

“Many of them came in here, as you know, and they couldn’t speak a word of English,” he told Port Melbourne oral historian Pat Grainger.

“They’d hand over their money to us because they had no idea what anything cost …

“When we had jukeboxes, we used to have Greek records and Italian records …The Italians, when they came out here …the crew used to come in … and buy chocolate … 20 of chocolate! They’d take it back to Italy because there were no sweets in Europe.

“After the war, there was nothing. And, with the Greeks, they would take sugar. We used to sell up to a ton of sugar in these little packets …The Indian crews on P&O ships … being poor, they used to take eucalyptus: that was their specialty.”
Ted Rohan recalls the days when streamers were sold to people farewelling departing ships. “They used to sell a hell of a lot of streamers. … You might sell 800,000 streamers on a ship. Used to be very colorful. They finally banned it because they thought it was too much to clean up …”
Loreto Iacuone has since died. Gentilina lives in a nursing home. From the first home in Johnston Street, Collingwood, the family would move on to Kew as their fortunes improved. Now there are four generations spread across Melbourne, in Bulleen, Templestowe and Mulgrave.

Among the last to come, Mrs Anna Trabucco’s family (the Pezzis) had stayed back longest because her father had a secure job in a chemical factory.

Despite the language classes on board, Mrs Trabucco (then Anna Pezzi) knew no English. A boy she had befriended was called Wayne. Perhaps because it was pronounced in a broad Australian accent, she thought this was wine, or vino. “I didn’t know that I couldn’t speak the same language as everybody else. I automatically assumed they all spoke Italian,” she says.

She was just 12 when the ship docked at Station Pier one night in May 1967. She remembers the joy in knowing there were grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, waiting below. The vivid colors of Smarties, a gift from a great-aunt – the same woman who had sponsored her grandfather Loreto when he came to “terra santa”.

THE SUNDAY AGE, 03-Jul-1994